Physics of Sports: Basketball Dunking
In this project, we were assigned to make a video of a sports action and the physics behind the action by the athletic director Mr. Pitti. We were only given about three weeks to film, develop, edit, and finish the video.
Our group chose to look into the physics of a dunk in basketball. We were able to film our dunk early because the day that we were assigned to make the film, there was an open gym basketball practice at San Marin's gym. We chose to use one of our returning varsity players, Calvin Geraci. We had Calvin dunk at one of San Marin's open gym sessions, where anyone can come in and play free basketball. This project was easily the hardest project for my group so far. Since not everybody is very knowledgeable about sports in my group, in made the task at hand much more difficult. Luckily enough, the other people in my group are very good at editing and that fun stuff, so it was a nice balance. We came up with a variety of different ideas for the video; baseball, basketball, lacrosse, or even squash. We finally settled on basketball dunking. Calvin then, was nice enough to dunk for us and let us videotape him. Here now are some key concepts and peaks/pits of our project. By the way, above is Lebron James dunking over a man on the court.
KEY CONCEPTS:
-FORCE: strength or energy as an attribute of physical action or movement
-MOMENTUM: the quantity of motion of a moving body, measured as a product of its mass and velocity
-SPEED: the rate in which something or someone is able to move or operate
-VELOCITY: speed of something in a given direction
Pits/Peaks
Two peaks were communication and focus. Our communication was good because not all of us were experts in basketball or film editing. We needed to talk about how we could fix our video and make it better. It made the video a lot better. The other peak was focus, even when times were bad. We lost our script was lost 5 times so it was a hard project. Our focus got better and the video was a success.
Two pits of our project were: keeping things organized and and staying on task. Getting organized was a difficulty because we were very off task sometimes which lead to losing the scripts five times. Staying on task as I previously mentioned, is a critical part of any task. It is easy to get off task but if you have a good leader who can direct you in the right way. As Wayne Gretzky says," You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
KEY CONCEPTS:
-FORCE: strength or energy as an attribute of physical action or movement
-MOMENTUM: the quantity of motion of a moving body, measured as a product of its mass and velocity
-SPEED: the rate in which something or someone is able to move or operate
-VELOCITY: speed of something in a given direction
Pits/Peaks
Two peaks were communication and focus. Our communication was good because not all of us were experts in basketball or film editing. We needed to talk about how we could fix our video and make it better. It made the video a lot better. The other peak was focus, even when times were bad. We lost our script was lost 5 times so it was a hard project. Our focus got better and the video was a success.
Two pits of our project were: keeping things organized and and staying on task. Getting organized was a difficulty because we were very off task sometimes which lead to losing the scripts five times. Staying on task as I previously mentioned, is a critical part of any task. It is easy to get off task but if you have a good leader who can direct you in the right way. As Wayne Gretzky says," You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.